This is a documentation suggestion. If you install uw-imap or any other service that runs under xinetd, you need to make one or two modification to the xinetd service configuration file to enable the service. A warning message, like this, should be added to every ebuild that creates xinetd.d entries: To enable this service within xinetd you must change the service file in /etc/xinetd.d and set the 'disable' flag to 'no'. By default, only localhost access is enabled. To allow remote hosts to use this service you must also add an 'only_from' entry to specify their IP addresses. You may also need to configure hosts.allow and hosts.deny. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. emerge xinetd 2. emerge uw-imap 3. try imap from a remote host 4. it always fails Actual Results: Remote imap did not work. The xinetd log did not say why the service failed. The service will not work automatically without these configuration changes. This is counter-inutitive. If I emerge a service, I want it to work. If we are not going to enable it, then we need to tell the person what to do to get it to work. Expected Results: I expected it to work like it did on my RedHat system. Expand the documentation as suggested above, or even enable the installed service.
(In reply to comment #0) > This is counter-inutitive. If I emerge a service, I want it to work. If we are > not going to enable it, then we need to tell the person what to do to get it to > work. > > Expected Results: > I expected it to work like it did on my RedHat system. Well, it
(In reply to comment #0) > This is counter-inutitive. If I emerge a service, I want it to work. If we are > not going to enable it, then we need to tell the person what to do to get it to > work. > > Expected Results: > I expected it to work like it did on my RedHat system. Well, it´s your opinion but there are other people who don´t want it configured this way - like me. :-p E.g., for samba, I definitely don´t want to have swat enabled by default. If I install finger, it does not mean at all that I want fingerd enabled by default as well, I just need the client. There are also many packages that may run either standalone or with xinetd and it´s up to the user to choose one or the other. Also, it seems like quite a bad idea to enable this with default configuration for these packages. It may be considered as a security measure NOT to enable services unless user has specifically configured them to run. Likewise, these services won´t run at start unless you add them to some runlevel via rc-update. Same behaviour should be kept with xinetd - i.e., you have to specifically enable them.
Gentoo policy is to have all services disabled by default ... so putting a notice everywhere is a bit redundant also, the hosts.{allow,deny} config is only required if you put 'tcpd' into your USE
